Chris Hayes on Our 'Endangered' Attentions
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From KQED.

From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on Forum, MSNBC host Chris Hayes spends a lot of time thinking about how to grab and hold people's attention. The stakes are high, he says, because those who can capture attention these days command fortunes, win elections, and topple regimes. We'll talk to Hayes about why it's become much harder to command attention, why Donald Trump is so effective at it, and how we can reclaim our own attention for the things that matter.

Hayes' new book is The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. Join us. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. What do you want to pay attention to? If you didn't have all the technologies and corporations vying for your attention, if your attention wasn't commodified and extracted, what would you affirmatively choose to pay attention to?

This is a version of a question from Chris Hayes' new book, The Siren's Call, which takes a deep dive into how our ability to choose what to pay attention to has basically been stolen from us, and how those like Donald Trump, who are effective at grabbing attention, have their hands on what Hayes calls the defining resource of our age. Hayes is host of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes. Chris, welcome to Forum.

It's so great to be on. Thanks for having me. Great to have you. So as a cable news host, someone who has to try to grab and hold people's attention, what makes it so incredibly hard to do that today?

Well, just the sheer competition. I mean, even in the course of the over a decade that I've been hosting an evening primetime show, you know, 12 years ago when I started, for instance, Netflix had no original programming. You know, like the idea when we started was you were competing against other linear channels on at the same time as you or other cable networks. And now in every single instant,

every piece of content, every play for your attention is in a very literal sense. I mean, truly, truly competing against the entire library of content ever produced. So the sheer scale of the attentional imperative and the competition is just a completely different level than it was even when I started doing this job. Yeah. So even though attention has long been considered...

a resource to exploit to gain money or power. The situation right now is unique. Yeah, I think there's a few things that mark it off. First of all, I think we all feel intuitively, and I would say correctly, that there's some kind of phase change that happens with the ubiquity of the smartphone. When Apple introduces the iPhone in 2007,

And, you know, there were portable technologies before, like the magazine, which actually was a huge deal. Paperback books, they were also a huge deal at the time. If you look at streetcar commuters in the 1910s, pictures of them, they're all reading the newspaper. But all of those things are quite finite. You get to the end of the newspaper, you get to the end of the magazine to have a portal to infinite.

jest at every moment is new. The scale of it is new. You know, TikTok has a billion users. Meta has between one and two billion users.

And the sophistication with which these corporations operating at scale are vying for our attention is new as well. So all three of those things, I think, sort of mark a kind of epochal break from what came before. I do want to get your thoughts on then the question of agency here. Like, aren't we choosing to some degree what we pay attention to, maybe even enjoying going down rabbit holes?

Yes, I think we are. I mean, I think look, I think the self is contested terrain. I think what what we're choosing and what is being extracted from us are there's not some neat, bright line. I mean, the animating image of the book and the title is taken from Odysseus in the Odyssey attempting to stop himself from steering the ship towards the sirens and thus his death. And he binds himself to the mast.

And what I think is powerful about image is that there's two different cells, right? There's the self who wants to go home and there's a self in the moment who's drawn to the sirens and he wants one to win out over the other. And that's us in many ways. Yes. Like we affirmatively choose things and there's tons. Let me be clear. I am not a, Oh, I don't even own a TV sort of person. Like I am extremely online. I, I think there's endless, endless,

brilliant and entertaining things that I found on the internet and that have grabbed my attention and things I've learned, things I didn't realize I would be interested in watching until they were presented towards me. But I think this sense of the contest itself is really at the core of the book. And the last thing I'll say too is one of the things that marks attention as different is that fundamentally we have a pre-conscious faculty for it. And what I mean by that is

If you're in a crowded room and someone drops a glass and it shatters, you don't get to volitionally choose whether to whip your head towards that sound. That faculty is compelled to

And it's preconscious. It's involuntary. And because that exists, because there's an actual involuntary wiring, there are ways that our attention can be pulled from us in a way that does really genuinely kind of bypass our conscious minds. Yeah. You say attention can be taken from us at a purely sensory level before our conscious will even gets to weigh in. And I think what you're also saying is that

you know, the technologies and corporations vying for our attention are aware of this and really homing in on this as part of their strategy? That's exactly right. I mean, if you are having a competitive attention market,

what you will find, and I think what has been borne out is the attention will select for and drive towards means of compelled involuntary attention. So the best example of this is just the buzz of your phone, right? They call haptic feedback in a phone.

It's a very smart bit of engineering. And what it means is, and I don't have my notifications turned on, but if you do, it's sitting there in your pocket when it buzzes again, that buzz gets your attention before you decide, do I want to check the notification or not? Like that's happening at the purely sensory level, like the glass shattering at a party and that's hardwired into the structure of the, you know, of the phone.

Let me invite our listeners to join the conversation. I want to know, listeners, if you relate to this idea that your attention is being taken from you. What do you think the impacts are of that? And what do you want to know about how to reclaim it if you do feel that way? Have you noticed a change in your ability to focus and what you focus on?

You can email forum at kqed.org, call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786, or post on our social channels at kqedforum. How are we harmed, Chris, when our attention is essentially coerced or when we lose so much agency over it?

You know, I think there's different ways to think about the harm. I think one way to think about the harm, and this is an argument that Jonathan Haidt makes in The Anxious Generation, particularly around teens and children, is sort of mental health outcomes, right? Higher levels of anxiety or depression. And there's like any broad literature, there are sort of arguments and contestation about whether that literature points in one direction or not, you know, definitively.

The thing that I'm trying to take over in this book, I would say, is sort of a more philosophical question. I think the harm comes to a deep sense of ourself and a profound experience of alienation. And I think the alienation is really the kind of key concept here. The experience that we are not in control of ourselves and there are things that should be internal to us, which is to say our reality.

to flash the spotlight of thought where we want to that are sort of being controlled by someone else or taken from us and are thus outside of us. And that I think is, I don't know, I'm curious to hear from your listeners. I think that's a kind of,

endemic sensation of the age that I think has extremely deep roots in who we are as people and the human condition, but is profoundly shaped and exacerbated by the technologies that we have. You mean like that icky feeling of, why did I spend so much time looking at that? Why did I purchase that? Why did I focus on that instead of something that is so much more meaningful to me? Yes. And that kind of...

that sense outside of yourself, we were just talking about the sort of different selves, right? The sense of like, who was that that did that? Is that me? Is that what I want to do? Or I wish I could be a different kind of person who does these things as opposed to those things, who puts his attention on this book that I brought on vacation as opposed to scrolling mindlessly, that kind of contestation. But there's also just a deep sense in which when you extend it out to sort of

both our kind of market and economic life and our political life, it's not just that it's outside of you. It's actually a value that's being transferred. Right. So there's something profound about that as well. I mean, even sort of recall Marx and what he says about labor, this relationship that gets created by the institutions of industrial capitalism, where

You're selling your labor for a wage. That labor ends up the product that you're making. The labor ends up kind of outside of you in this way that produces this sense of alienation. I think there's something similar happening with our attention. Yeah. Talk about the implications for civic democracy of this loss of attention, because you say some really interesting things like you say.

The simple truth has profound implications for our civic health because, to put it reductively, what gets attention is a very different category from what's important for sustaining a flourishing society. And you also say the question of which issues we pay attention to determines more about the trajectory of our democracy and culture than they ever have.

Yeah, I think that this this competition for attention. Well, the first thing I think in that first sentence is the idea that and this is really important. Attention is not a moral faculty. It it is distinct from our evaluations of what's important or what's good.

And, you know, going back to the phantom public that Walter Libman writes in the 1920s, he's writing about the outcome of the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles. And he can sense that the public's not that interested. And he says the American public has a great interest in the outcome of the negotiations in Versailles, but they're not interested in it. The same way a child has a great interest in his father's business, but is not interested in it. And we're all and then he says we're all interested in like the queen's latest dress, basically.

So this dynamic, right, like what is, quote unquote, important or what we think is important for self-governance and what draws people attention, that's been there for a long time. But under the conditions we're in, in which the attentional regime has kind of broken down, it is this kind of constant, ceaseless war of all against all in every single second.

attention becomes so important that whatever other values that you might have been competing with it, like sort of civic conceptions of journalism or the public good are just getting swallowed. And so you have this universe that's selecting for the most lurid or prurient or obnoxious or offensive, you know, kinds of things. And then in that context of this kind of fallen attention regime, I think you get people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk being too

who are very good at dominating attention along precisely those lines. And I think there's genuine civic danger in that. Yeah. Joan writes, Trump has figured out how to manipulate media so he is the center of attention 24-7, not unlike a five-year-old with parents who won't say, no, you can't have your way all the time. Now he is in one of the most powerful positions in the world, threatening to exact retribution on anyone who speaks out against him.

How can the media report on Trump without participating in his need to suck all the oxygen

out of the room. We're coming up on a break, but I do want to get into Trump, his recent moves and so on right after the break. We're talking with Chris Hayes. Join the conversation with your thoughts on any changes you've noticed in your ability to pay attention and what you think the impacts of this are. 866-733-6786, the number. We're on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram and others at KQED Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Hey, have you heard of On Air Fest? It's a premier festival for sound and storytelling taking place in Brooklyn from February 19th through 21st. I'm Morgan Sung, host of KQED's new tech and culture show, Close All Tats, and I'll be there at the fest to give a sneak preview of the show, along with an

You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about attention and why my guest, Chris Hayes, MSNBC host of All In with Chris Hayes and author of a new book, The Story of a New Life, is a great guest.

called the siren's call how attention became the world's most endangered resource.

About why he calls it the defining resource of our age and about why we involuntarily give our attention to things we wouldn't otherwise prioritize and about why Donald Trump is so effective at grabbing attention. And you, our listeners, can join the conversation by emailing forum at kqed.org, posting on our social channels at KQED Forum or calling us at 866-733-6786. I want to talk to you about Donald Trump.

the strength of our democracy, the recent decisions that he's made that are getting attention. And in particular, I want to talk with you about the January 6th pardons for more than 1,500 of them, right? Pardons and commutations to January 6th insurrectionists, which you covered on your show. First, Chris, can you just remind us the scope of what Trump did last week?

So there were, you know, the Justice Department has spent the last four years in what is, you know, my colleague Ryan Riley says the largest investigation in the Department of Justice history. And Merrick Garland is in the same in finding and bringing cases against people that invaded the Capitol. And there's a real range of people. There are people who were at the event. They were in a crowd and they went inside the Capitol, but they didn't vandalize anything inside and they didn't, you know,

use any violence. That's sort of the lowest scale, but those people still committed and, you know, to my mind, important crime and to the department of justice has mine, an important crime. And many of them are prosecuted. A lot of them did not get,

you know, prison time going all the way up to people that concussed cops, you know, bear spray them in the face, bash them with their own batons and two different groups, the proud boys and the oath keepers who were convicted of a sedition, which is, you know, one of the gravest crimes, um,

in the criminal code, basically a violent plot to overturn the rightful government, seditious conspiracy. In fact, a very difficult conviction to get. The last big seditious conspiracy trial, which is a militia in Michigan, actually ended up with acquittals or acquittals or mistrial, I forget, but not convictions. And so there was this sense, I mean, J.D. Vance said the weekend before Donald Trump was inaugurated that they were going to sort of separate out

the kind of lower level folks who did not commit violence. And then he says, you know, anyone who committed violence, obviously, that was his word, obviously, they need to be held accountable.

And then Donald Trump just pardoned or commuted them all. The commutations were for the seditious conspiracy convictions, although Enrique Tarrio got a full pardon, but basically went whole hog and said they're all getting out, including people that, you know, wore a Camp Auschwitz shirt and people that, you know, got on Facebook and bragged about how much fun it was to spray bear spray in the face of cops who were choking at that moment. I mean, really, really.

heinous and vile behavior that I think the vast majority of Americans don't approve of. So talk about what is so damaging from your perspective about what Trump has done in issuing these pardons. Well, I mean, it's a message. It's an endorsement of political violence. It's not about redemption. It's about saying,

It doesn't matter that you undertook these grave crimes and used violence. If you're loyal to me, you will be rewarded. And then after that, this past weekend, Trump had a rally in Las Vegas. And on stage was Stuart Rhodes, who was the head of the Oath Keepers, who was doing decades for seditious conspiracy because of the sophisticated plot that the Oath Keepers put together to use January 6th and mob violence as a kind of

leverage point to end the transition of power and to override the will of the American voters so as to put Donald Trump in power over Joe Biden back in 2021. He is on stage that I mean, yeah, these are these are not idiots. I mean, they know what they're doing. So it's like that not even end up there on accident. It wasn't like someone forgot to Google that the message is these are my people. They are violent. They will use violence. I approve of that violence.

And this is a key part of the way that I will use wield power is through violence intimidation. The message is as clear as day. Yeah. And I mean, and it goes without saying that it hugely undermines the rule of law. You know, you pointed out that in the past, this would have been an administration consuming scandal, right? I mean, the fact that you just direct your DOJ to

To get rid of, to end all of these cases, get rid of all of these charges. Yeah, I want to make one distinction here. I think it's important. The mass pardons themselves, I think, are politically toxic, both on the politics, on the substance. I think they send a clear and awful message. The pardon power is, you know,

unequivocally granted to the president and other presidents have used it. The sort of closest probably analog would be Jimmy Carter and his pardons of people that avoided the draft, which was also a day one sort of thing. It was a large class of people, I think very, very, very different substantively. What is totally unprecedented, and I think it's actually important to make this distinction for a second, is ordering the Justice Department to drop active cases on the first day. I mean, basically since Nixon,

There has been both through law, norm and internal department regulation, an extremely strong structure built up to put some distance between the functioning of the Department of Justice as the people's prosecutor and the White House, such that it is not the case. The president just goes over, sends a message to Department of Justice and says, don't prosecute that person. He's my friend or go prosecute that person. He's my enemy.

I think it's very obvious why we'd want that distinction. And of course, what was uncovered in the Watergate investigation showed precisely how dangerous abuse of power like that could be. On day one, Trump installed an acting U.S. attorney in D.C., a man who had been a stop the steal partisan and who had actually represented some of these folks who had engaged in January 6th. And that individual said,

Had his office drop active cases at the behest of the president. This is we have not seen this in a very, very long time. We have definitely not seen it in the post Watergate era. So given these impacts and these implications, is the public, in your view, concerned?

paying attention. It was covered by you, was covered by major outlets. You pointed out that pardons poll terribly. They're not politically popular. But do you feel like the public is able to pay attention to this in the way that they should? I think it's hard. And I think I write about this in the book and to your listeners, very astute question. I mean, Trump

There's a few ways this attentional dominance works. One is a shortcut to getting attention is to be obnoxious or rude. And he's good at that and he's comfortable with the blowback from it because it gets attention. The other is to just sort of overwhelm and do lots of things. And we've seen that here where it's very difficult to focus. And in a distracted age, focus is power.

And that, I think, is part of the problem. The reason that in prior administrations this would have been a bigger deal is because the actions themselves would be competing against fewer other newsworthy actions. It is very clearly intentional to kind of overwhelm the ability to focus through sheer cacophony, which, of course, is the experience of life in the attention age, right? Cacophony and, you know,

constant pulls on our attention and stimuli and like being an incredibly loud and crowded room. And so one of the things I think that's incumbent upon us and a thing I've really been trying to do is, is to focus. I mean, you know, attention is in William James formulation, a kind of choosing an exercise of will, right? When we're not having it taken out of our will, when we're in control. And so for me,

We have really stayed on that pardon story. We have focused on Pete Hegseth and tried to stay with stories as a means of sort of

you know, fighting against this, this sense of cacophony and distraction. Yeah. Noel is reflecting that cacophony. Noel on Discord writes, the modus operandi of Trump is to flood our attention. How do we discern what is important to deal with from what is a distraction and not worth our attention and energy? Well, Gulf of America, for one. The other thing that you say is that Trump, um,

really is okay with negative attention or has really shown that any attention is good attention in this attention age potentially. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So I think it's important not to overlearn the lesson here. I think my contention is prior to Trump, the general received wisdom for politicians is

was that positive attention was good. And then after that would be no attention. You're not making any news. No one's, you know, hearing about you. And below that would be negative attention, right? So if you're given the choice between no attention, you didn't make news, you're not in the headlines that day, or negative attention, you're making news for the wrong reasons and ways that people might be angry at you. You choose no attention. The simple insight of Trump, which I think he arrived at through, frankly, sheer psychological brokenness,

is that negative attention maybe is better than no attention. That if attention matters more than anything else, it matters more than persuasion, it matters more than these other things that you want attention to get as means to an end, then, you know, all press is good press. The old procliful P.T. Barnum line, about as long as you spell my name correctly, he truly feels that. And he has wielded it to positive effect for him politically, although we should be clear, right?

He was had low approval ratings throughout his presidency. He was a one term president. He had more people vote against him in 2020 than anyone has ever voted against anyone ever. He absolutely won the 2024 election by a fairly narrow margin historically. And he also enters with like fairly low approval ratings. So that tradeoff.

It's not like he magically made it go away. He's kind of gotten the better side of the trade in two out of three elections, one of them because the Electoral College. Now, what's also interesting is other people that have attempted to pull this off.

Republican Trump like candidates have ended up on the wrong side of the trade, and we've seen candidate after candidate in swing states, states Trump one sort of deadlocked middle of the road states where they have run candidates who tried Trump like to dominate attention through kind of trolling and outrageousness and.

And it didn't work. People didn't like them. So there's something distinct about the way Trump is is handling this. That's not as obviously replicable to really. I mean, it's a fascinating phenomenon. Yeah. Do you have a sense of what that it is that something distinct thing is? Two, two things. One is humor. I think Trump is funny and he is he his humor comes from a strange, almost at moments,

performative, ironic distance from what he's doing, which is, I think, very hard to pull off. But the more important thing, I think, is his obsessive need for attention, like deep, deep, deep is so true to who he is. He is truly that broken. I think you can't fake not caring about negative. Like you can't fake that brokenness. And if you try to, you get basically the Ron DeSantis campaign.

Most people, including myself, don't want I don't like if someone said you could trade places with with someone like Donald Trump, where everyone in America would know who you are and would be thinking about you a lot. And half of them would just absolutely hate you like they would dance in the streets if something happened to you.

I would not want that. Most people would not want that. So it's what's what's sort of perverse about this era is that I think it is really selecting for a certain kind of psychological makeup. I think it's being replicated in Elon Musk, for whom I think it is also genuine and authentic in its own broken way. But I think trying to perform it if you don't have it.

leaves voters a little cold and you end up on the wrong side of that trade. Yeah. Though you do critique Democrats. You say the media management around Democrats involves so much risk aversion. If the choice is negative attention or no attention, we take no attention every time, meaning Democrats. And that is the wrong choice. Yeah. And I think this has been a real problem. I mean, I think you see it right now even. You know, there are people who have a real genius for attention. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a great example who

are less afraid of that trade-off. She's more like, she goes on Instagram live. This is a great example. Most democratic politicians, if you told your staff, I'm just going to go on Instagram live and talk to people and answer questions. They'd be like, oh, wait, don't do that. Something might go wrong. Someone, a troll might show up. We got to prep you. We got to control it. There might be negative attention. It's like, no, I'm just going to go talk to people. And I actually think this is really important, particularly in an era. I think people are more forgiving now than

Of the kind of looseness of conversation and even social media, because there's just so much all the time. Everyone's posting all the time. They're talking all the time. I think that the old kind of formal standard that you would hold politicians to is totally degraded, but it still exists in the minds of Democratic politicians and their staff members.

We're talking to Chris Hayes, and so are you, Adele on Discord Rights. What is capturing my attention? Well, this segment, for one, is capturing my attention. Good. That's the idea. Success. No. Okay, let me go to Eli in San Francisco. Hi, Eli. You're on. Thanks for waiting.

Hi, yeah, no worries. It's funny you guys brought up the January 6th thing. So I'm one of those people. I took a hiatus off Facebook January 2021. I was just one of those people arguing with everybody, my relatives, people in other states, all of that. And based on what you guys talked about earlier, you know, my life got at least 30% better being off of social media completely. For three years, I had more attention for people.

Oh, sorry, Eli. I think we lost you right there. But I'm struck by what you were saying at the end there that your life was like so much better after you got off social media. And, you know, how do we reclaim our attention? Opting out may be an option for some, but I don't think it's realistic, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I do think some people are going to opt out. I think we're going to see more and more opting out. One of the things, one of the big messages of the last part of this book is, yes, there's individual things you can do. There's all kinds of ways that people create rules and routines and habits around where they put their attention. That.

Sometimes work, sometimes don't. My big one thing is for people to spend 20 minutes alone with their thoughts every day, which I think is just great practice. You don't even have to do meditative practice, spiritual practice. I don't particularly do that. I just go for walks. But I think that's a good place to start. But one of the points of the book is, yes, there's individual things you can do. I think if you're on social media, like curating who you're following and, you know, making sure that you're not.

getting locked into arguments with people that you should just mute. Like there are little things you can do.

But the bigger thing is that we actually need to change the structures of this. I mean, one way to do that is to revive non-commercial models of digital life and culture that have been mostly swallowed by the big platforms and that existed before the kind of non-commercial open Internet that gave birth to the World Wide Web with a browser that you could send yourself to any direction. You weren't locked into some platform, open collaborative user groups through Usenet.

and message boards, Wikipedia. We had a non-monetized version of the internet. There was obvious commerce happening on it, but fundamentally there were non-commercial spaces in a way that isn't really been replicated now. We kind of have gone back to having all the time we spend online being in commercial spaces, moving through spaces in which the platform itself is architected

to grab our attention and monetize it. And so creating alternatives to that is, I think, really urgent. And then above that, I think there's government and regulatory conversations to have about how we regulate the large platforms and how we regulate attention specifically as distinct from speech and content, which is tricky but important. Yeah, we're about to come up on a break, but give me one example of a regulatory move because they all sound just so hard to...

accomplish or unlike. I mean, age limits is one, right? That's, you know, that that has nothing to do with specific content, although, you know, there's content that you don't want kids to see. But there's a number of states that are looking at it. Some have even passed age limits. There are people on the left and civil libertarians who think it's a bad idea and particularly have real concerns about, you know, access to information about LGBTQ stuff.

But I think that's where this non-commercial internet comes into play. You need them in tandem, which is the regulation and along with public spaces where people can share information and do the things the internet was built to do without their attention being monetized. We're talking with Chris Hayes, who's written a book, The Sirens Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. You know him as host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. And we'll have more with him and with you after the break. I'm Nina Kim. ♪

Coming up tomorrow on Forum, Spotify was originally marketed as a democratic, anti-establishment platform. But according to music journalist Liz Pelley, it has evolved to favor major labels and its own algorithmic playlists, all while underpaying independent artists. Pelley pulls back the curtain on the music streaming giant and how it's manipulating our tastes. Her new book is Mood Machine, The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist. Join us.

Listen to past Forum shows by going to Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search KQED Forum. Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about attention and why my guest Chris Hayes calls it the defining resource of our age. The ways we involuntarily give our attention to things we otherwise wouldn't want to. Why Donald Trump is so effective at it.

and how it's just becoming harder for journalists like Hayes to capture and hold attention on important issues. He's written a book called The Siren's Call, and you, our listeners, are sharing changes you've noticed in your ability to focus,

Whether you relate to the idea that your attention is being taken, what you think the impacts are, what you want to know about how to reclaim it at 866-733-6786 on our social channels, Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, and others at our email address, forum at kqed.org. And Martina on Discord writes...

I read Daniel Imavar's New Yorker essay about Hayes and others' recent work on attention over the weekend. And I wonder what his take is on Imavar's suggestion that the creative class is actually having a crisis of authority with the rise of user-generated content.

Yeah, I thought it was a thoughtful and interesting essay, but I think there's a few things wrong with it. First of all, it's interesting to me he is reflecting a kind of academic consensus on this in which the broad academic consensus is that these mediums don't really matter and that sort of audience choice is in the driver's seat. That has been the kind of general, both historical, sociological view of all this. People like Marshall McLuhan

who made the opposite point are like extremely unfashionable in large swaths of the Academy. So I think there's like a weird...

resistance to seeing what to me is just the obvious extractive quality of these platforms and a little bit of like you don't feel what you feel you're feeling in this message. I do think it's important, his point about these sort of historical, you know, this idea that there have been moral panics about other technologies and the stove stuff that he talks about, like

I think it's definitely true. And in fact, a large part of the first chapter of the book is devoted to precisely that. There's quotes from 1890s where someone says, you know, these magazines mean that every day now after dinner, when you sit around the fire, the whole family is each is absorbed in their own magazine. No one's talking to each other anymore, which I thought was very funny because it perfectly mimics, you know, what we say about screens. So there really is something to that. My contention is a,

A lot of the critiques of enormous changes to where our attention goes at a given moment, even if there's parts of them that don't age very well, there's also they're also not wrong. Like when you think about Walden Pond and Thoreau, the version of industrial noise that he's fleeing is looks quaint compared to now. But people still read Walden Pond for a reason.

The alienation born of modern life he's identifying, which I think in many ways has accelerated, is profound and true. And the kind of philosophical point that I'm trying to make here is it might be the case that there's nothing wrong per se from health outcome perspective if you were to, say, stay in your house 13 hours a day playing video games.

But the philosophical question of whether that's living a good life, I think I think is very clear that it's not. Now, you might say that that belief of mine is a kind of antiquated gatekeeper belief that small d democratic choice here is that it's actually good to do that. And I'm a kind of old school fuddy duddy for thinking it's not. And I guess I would just say, like, sure, guilty as charged. But I still have that profound belief and willing to argue why it's the case.

Well, on the topic of strategies, Mulzajo on Discord writes,

Mimi writes, it's not only our attention that has been degraded, but our attention span. The inability to focus on something for more than 15 seconds inhibits our ability to read long-form communication of any kind and to think critically and make informed decisions. I do wonder, Chris, if you think our ability...

to expand our attention exists, like that our individual attention is not necessarily finite per se. Totally. Yeah. Yes. And I think actually, and I want to sort of offer a kind of, not a counter to my own argument, but something that sits aside it. And people made this point, like it's also the case that in this era, people listen to three-hour podcasts in a way that would have seemed inconceivable earlier.

And it's also the case that people will go to see Wagner's The Ring Cycle for eight hours and watch, you know, I'll watch a 30 minute carpet cleaning video. The things that can attract people's attention and hold them are far more varied and delightfully strange than you might have anticipated.

And I think both of those aspects of ourselves, to get back to that question you said before about how much of this is choice and what's the real self in us, that the amazing thing about attention is that the both exist side by side. Right. The allure of the kind of the sirens call of, you know, the casino floor or the tabloid

checkout counter at the supermarket or the Times Square billboard or the buzz of the phone. Like that's all there partly, I think, as a kind of neurological and evolutionary inheritance. And then the part of us that some people like to go to long, you know, classical music concerts and other people can sit and look at a painting for

30 minutes. That part of us is there too. And I think it's a question of which we cultivate. What do we habituate to? What do we cultivate? What do the markets and institutions produce in terms of what our behavior is and how that affects those desires? It sounds like you feel that sense of alienation and disconnection and weird sense of

loss of control is creating a very strong and profound energy that could become a backlash? Yes. I think it's everywhere you see it now. I mean, even in the course of writing this book, I wrote the essay I wrote for The New Yorker, I guess, was in 2022 or 21. And then I turned it into a book proposal. Even in the course of the last two years of working on the book, the topic has become so much more...

discussed so much clearer to people. It's almost like talking now about air travel or traffic, right? I mean, one of those sort of conversation makers that everyone agrees with. And what I think you're seeing is the foundation is there now for backlash, both politically, personally. And the thing that I compare it to, which I think is a useful...

comparison point is food and sort of industrial food production. You know, we had decades of the unleashing of sort of global industrial food chains and, you know, the commercialization of Coca-Cola and McDonald's, but also the, you know, the grocery store with the foods produced at enormous scale

And that produced this kind of backlash that started at the fringes with hippies who were buying small farms and starting natural food stores and opening green markets and food, you know, farm to table restaurants and all that crept from the edges into the real mainstream of American life. Because people basically were like, I don't like don't like this model. I don't like this food. I don't like eating it. I don't like what's behind it. I don't like who's profiting off of it.

That critique really developed into a full sort of political and cultural backlash. It's still going now. There are all sorts of issues with it in terms of the class lines that it operates along. And I wouldn't for a second say they're like, oh, it's great. Everyone now has like fresh food. Not true.

But I do think we're at that point, this kind of almost terminal point with attentional culture that we were with food culture now where people are just desperate for alternatives. And they're going to come from strange places, from, you know, Vanguard places and people dropping out and people creating no phone institutions or people selling dumb phones, which some people are doing, which are actually taking off for a lot of people. Like there's a bunch of ways people are going to start rebelling to it before it coheres into something

that we can identify as a whole, but I think you're already starting to see it. And who do you think will be the winners and losers of this? Or do you have an idea of what political party would benefit from that? I have no idea. I truly don't. I really, I feel humble about the future in every single way. I don't know. I do think that there was something

pretty stark and clarifying about the image at the inauguration of the president, United States, and then the Elon Musk Zuckerberg, all Altman, um, Musk at all, uh, you know, the sort of all of the people who are profiting off this model, uh,

Including Trump, who's profiting in his own way, in fact, just profited off a meme coin in direct dollar terms, which is like the pure distilled monetization of attention together, consolidating power that is clarifying for people that and is going to aid the backlash.

Susan writes, it's difficult to focus when there's so many assaults and no clear leader in the Democratic Party to focus our response. Stephen writes, I'd be able to focus and pay attention to the important things in life if Trump would just be quiet for a few minutes. Let me go to caller Jason in Richmond. Hi, Jason, you're on. Yes, hi, can you hear me? Yep, go right ahead. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, a fascinating show. Probably need about at least 20 more shows to just even cover all the topics. But I just wanted to say,

That one thing I find ironic is that we still call it a phone because it's one of the last features we use on our phone. You know, it's more of an entertainment system than anything in an arcade, you know. It's just... And the other thing I want to also say is that

I've listened to a lot of these podcasts and shows talking of this topic, and a lot of the times they're saying, oh, the kids are being affected. But it's also the adults, I think, are equally affected by it. I don't know how many times ago, even in my workplace, I work with special needs families.

and underprivileged kids and I find a lot of the workers there are on their phones when they should be with their students and I've reported it um and you know uh but it still exists it still happens despite you know the warnings to workers about being on your phone when you're at work and so on uh

Going to a hospital in New York not that long ago where you have to sign in before you can even get past the front desk.

I walk right past the security guard because he was on his phone. He didn't even notice I was there. I mean, so that's just one of, you know, many examples. Yeah. Well, Jason, really appreciate sharing your observations. And Chris, I don't know if you want to comment on some of the points Jason just made. The point Jason made about adults, I think, is really crucial. And it's actually a huge emphasis of mine, I think.

this conversation gets so displaced onto like kids. What does it do in the minds of kids? Which is a totally understandable concern I have as a parent. I have three children, 13, 10 and seven. Like, obviously this is front of mind for me, but I do think it's a, it's a little bit of a weird evasion because obviously it's doing something to us adults as well. And I think there's even arguments to be made. And I make some of them in the book that it's the older you are, the worse equipped you are.

to deal with it. I think, you know, to the degree that you're native to this attentional landscape, the more you start to erect barriers around notifications, for instance, or figure out ways, coping strategies to kind of focus your attention, that I think is actually really hard for folks that are older and not used to it. They're coming from situations in which they didn't have notifications constantly pulling at them.

So I think that that point about, you know, this is as big a deal, if not a bigger deal for adults, is a key part of reckoning with what's really going on here. Because if we put it all on the problem is children, I think it's kind of evasion. Let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. And Chris Hayes will be in conversation with Michael Lewis on February 3rd at 7 at Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco. He'll also be in San Diego on February 5th at 7.

with Talking San Diego in conversation with Harry Lipman. Tickets are available for both of those appearances as well. Chris has written a book, The Siren's Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, and he's host of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes. I want to talk to you about sort of, I don't want to use the word reckoning, but just how the media, how you are thinking about, you know,

grabbiness versus what's important because sometimes they work against each other, right? But also how you measure success and is it still just all about the ratings, ratings, ratings, ratings, the numbers, numbers, numbers? You know, I stopped looking at ratings four or five years ago in COVID. Well,

It was 2020. We were dealing, it was six weeks into the COVID pandemic. And I think what I could start to see was that there was this initial rush where people were in their home and watching the news and watching intensively because they were like, what is going on? How do I protect my family? I get my hands on toilet paper, like all of that stuff. And then totally understandably, people started to tune out a little bit from stuff about COVID. And I started to see that and it was stressing me out. And I just had a thought of like,

you know what, we got a job to do here. That's literally life or death. And I'm just not going to look at the numbers. And I haven't looked back since. And I think it's probably been good for me. I think I'm done this long enough that I have a innate judgment for what is attention grabbing. It's a little like, it's like surfing a wave, um,

And so I think it's been good for me. The other the other thing I would say about this, this this tension, which I think is an unavoidable one. And this, to be clear, is an unavoidable one, as Walter Lippman was writing about, you know, 1922 or, you know, earlier than that. It's an unavoidable one for everyone before the attention age. It's exacerbated now.

I, you know, when we talk about central banks, the Federal Reserve, they have what's called the dual. There's two things they're supposed to do that are often in direct tension with each other. They're supposed to keep the economy growing very fast and job growth high while they keep on inflation low. And those two things are often interrelated.

in some tension, right? When you're raising interest rates, the fear is that you're going to actually start to bring the growth of the economy down. You're going to actually make people poorer. You're going to put people out of work in order to keep that inflation low. And the reason it's hard to be a central banker is you're making difficult judgment calls between these two. And I think basically we have a dual mandate ourselves. My dual mandate is to get and hold attention,

And to give people the tools they need to be active, persistent self-governance. And, you know, those two things can sometimes be intention, things that are trivial but spectacular, things that are vital but not particularly intentionally salient. And my job is to get good enough at what I do to find a way to resolve that tension day in, day out. And it's basically a day by day dynamic work to do. Absolutely.

Absolutely. We are... I could hear the recognition, Mina, in your voice. Yeah, you're figuring it out every day, honestly. And it's getting harder, right? This administration makes it harder, too. But I will ask you, Chris, if... I started the conversation, the introduction with a quote from your book, though you used we more and I used you in that in terms of...

you know, what would you affirmatively choose to pay attention to if you could? And I'm just curious if you've thought about that for yourself. If you had full power over your attention, what would you pay attention to? I mean, I think for me, it's Kate, my wife, my three kids, Ryan, David, and Anya, my parents and my friends and my loved ones. And then it's my intellectual pursuits, the hobbies I have, playing guitar, making pasta,

thinking about things that are exciting to me, like the intellectual projects and goals that I have for myself. In some ways, this book was one of those and was really, really good for my soul because it forced discipline on that. And in some ways, that's the way that I buy myself to the mast. But I think generally we have pretty shared senses of

Who are the people in our lives and what are the things we want to pay attention to? And I think if we give ourselves the space, we'll come to a set of answers. People are different, but there's a lot that we have in common on that score. Yeah. And by the way, your kids' ages are almost the exact same ages as my kids. I have three of them as well. Oh, wow. That's awesome. Speaking of shared, the book is The Siren's Call. Chris, thank you so much for talking with us.

I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for having me. MSNBC host Chris Hayes, all in with Chris Hayes' show. Thank you, listeners. Thank you, Suzy Britton, for producing today's segment. You've been listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kinn.

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